artists – Hive76http://www.hive76.org
Making Things Awesome, Making Awesome ThingsWed, 30 Nov 2016 14:46:04 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.118037764Lost Artwork Found!http://www.hive76.org/lost-artwork-found
http://www.hive76.org/lost-artwork-found#respondWed, 29 Apr 2015 16:22:31 +0000http://www.hive76.org/?p=5894One of our members Marie made a beautiful painting of Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII. Sadly when Marie moved away from Philly to pursue her programming career her painting got lost in the abyss that is the Hive76 utility closet. Luckily her painting resurface and is now on display for everyone to appreciate.

1:00 – 5:00 PM $10/ at door

Leave a comment below for RSVP

Got a sweetheart? Want to meet a sweetheart? David and Leslie are back to share the Valentine’s love. Make sweet gifts and learn about 3D printing and paper circuits at the same time. For the gamer in your life, there’s a Valentine Creeper. Got an inspirational do-gooder? Here’s a movie inspired MockingJay pin. Just want to show you care? Well, they’re working on a pixel heart necklace/keychain, that is sure to please.

While your piece prints, make a Valentine card that will illuminate your sweetheart’s soul. Bring some materials from around your house and combine them with a variety of papers, copper tape, LED and battery to create the perfect paper circuit. If you love crafting and electronics, you are about to experience maker heaven. If you’ve never been here before, you can tour the space and find out more about other member’s projects. Munchies will be on hand. Don’t forget to comment below so we know you are coming!

Electronics and digital technology can infuse works of art with an element of magic. At The Hacktory we have literally put this magic in people’s hands, through classes and large public events. We want to do more though. We want to make our classes available to artists. We’ve found that they are usually the most excited to take our classes and play with technology, but usually the least able to pay for our classes.

The Hacktory is creating a program called T.E.R.A. Incognita: Tech Education and Residency for Artists. Our goal is to support artists who want to create new work and experiment with technology such as cameras, projectors, sensors, robots, software and circuits. The name “T.E.R.A Incognita” is part acronym, part vision for the program. We want to give these artists an opportunity to learn and explore at the edges of technology and art, literally in unchartered territory, to create new experiences and new possibilities with code, hardware and creative expression.

Super-wide screen made from a single large sheet of bacterial cellulose “paper”

PJ and a number of other Hive members have been fortunate enough to participate in preparations for the Drexel Design Futures Lab “Projects 12/13” exhibition. PJ was almost certainly the most involved Hive contributor — he helped with the development of a number of key software elements for several of the exhibits.

Side view of a BC culture, showing the cellulose pellicle (white “gel” on surface), growth medium and some bacteria/yeast colonies (dark brown structures). The bubbles are CO2 produced by the yeast.

I wound up getting involved in the creation of a special display screen that was part of an interactive piece which allows people to “play” with a computer model of bacterial swarms. This piece was part of Tashia Tucker’s exhibit, and she wanted an “organic looking” display surface. After some brainstorming that included condemnations of the high price of silicone etc., PJ suggested bacterial cellulose. What!? The idea of a movie screen made by real bacteria to show movies of simulated bacteria was too “meta” to pass up.

I had grown some fairly large sheets of bacterial cellulose in the past, and was interested in having an excuse to grow something even larger — so sign me up! Tashia wanted a sheet that started out about 4’x8′ so that the final screen could be cropped to dimensions that were about the size of a slightly gigantic person.

Yikes — this was literally a tall order. Bacterial Cellulose (BC) is created by the same organisms that are used to ferment Kombucha — in fact, the “Shroom” or “Scoby” in a Kombucha culture is a big lump of cellulose. So this was simple, in principle, but the scale of the piece left a lot of novel details that had to be worked out.

Bioreactor Vessel: I remembered talking to Scott Beibin a few years back about whether BC could be produced artisanally in large sheets. BC sheets will generally grow to cover the entire surface of any container they inhabit. In fact, Scott speculated that there was probably no limit to the size of sheets that could be grown, and suggested (flippantly, I suspect) that you could even use a kiddie pool. $25 at Target, thank-you-very-much.

Nutrients: This is kombucha, right? So one cup of sugar per gallon .. hmm .. and three inches of fluid * 8′ * 4′ makes, … um .. 8 cubic feet of water which is … lessee … about 60 gallons, so 60 cups of sugar is about 30 lbs. And we need some tea, so let’s say 200 tea bags. And we can toss in two gallons of vinegar and a half-cup of activated yeast to kick-start the fermentation. All available at your neighborhood grocery store for $30 or $40 or so.

Grow Site: BC cultures can get pretty rank, and this grow was going to consume a lot of floor space, so an indoor location was out of the question. It also had to be close enough to Drexel to allow for occasional visits in order to care for the culture. My sister was kind enough to offer us a secluded spot in her back yard.

“Bioreactordome”, otherwise known as a tent with a kiddie pool that contains an over-sized kombucha culture.

Shelter: The BC cultures are pretty robust, but we needed a way to protect the pool from the elements. Target wins again. Tent to fit our kiddie pool with a little room to spare? $90. Shoving the oversized, semi-inflated pool through the undersized door? Priceless.

There were miscellaneous other items — baking soda to neutralize the incredibly strong acetic acid in the harvested BC, buckets for mixing etc., plastic sheets to spread the harvested cellulose out etc. etc. And there was a day or two of panic when, two weeks into the grow, there was no evidence that we were growing anything but a fetid swamp in a kiddie pool (nothing special about that). Then the BC started growing with a vengeance, and we harvested it about three weeks into the venture — just in time to dry it and mount it for the exhibition.

A week later, we managed to pull a second sheet out. This second sheet was qualitatively different from the first — it was generally thinner and weaker, and it had a few holes — but it was more uniform in the sense that it had a single, well-defined layer. By this time Tashia was a pro with the material. She deftly cut a strip of BC from one edge of the sheet, sliced the strip into a few square patches and slapped a patch over every void in the sheet. BC is miraculous that way. Since it starts out as a hydrogel, you can repair defects by placing a patch of “good” gel over any holes. The two sheets will fuse together at a molecular level as they dry, resulting in a repair that is about as strong as the original sheet and nearly invisible.

We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat: At any rate, I’m going to claim, solely on the basis of “this is the biggest sheet of BC I have ever seen after scouring the Internet for big sheets”, that this may be a world record of sorts. If there’s a larger sheet out there, I’m interested in learning about it (and will gladly relinquish the title). Even if this actually is a “record”, it’s a title that we expect to lose at some point, since the key to a larger sheet is simply a larger pool (and more tea etc.).

]]>http://www.hive76.org/drexel-design-futures-bacterial-cellulose-and-a-world-record-maybe/feed55017FREE EVENT THIS THURSDAY: Through the Looking Glasshttp://www.hive76.org/free-event-this-thursday-through-the-looking-glass
http://www.hive76.org/free-event-this-thursday-through-the-looking-glass#respondTue, 04 Jun 2013 18:30:05 +0000http://www.hive76.org/?p=4921This Thursday, please join us at a FREE exhibition of the work of Cornelius Varley (1800-1860) put on by the venerable American Philosophical Society. It is a fantastic exploration of the life work of this fellow tinkerer and inventor who’s insight and explorations reminds me a lot of our Hive76 members!

A few of us will also be presenting at this event! We will have live 3D sugar glass printing, exhibitions of Brendan’s boom cases, Dan’s 8 mm RockBox, PJ’s electronics, Corrie’s textiles and artwork, Chris Terrell’s wood burning, and maybe a few more things.

]]>http://www.hive76.org/free-event-this-thursday-through-the-looking-glass/feed04921Processing and Rackethttp://www.hive76.org/processing-and-racket
http://www.hive76.org/processing-and-racket#commentsSat, 01 Jun 2013 19:32:42 +0000http://www.hive76.org/?p=4906Lately, I’ve been teaching myself the Racket programming language. It has a very interesting combination of tools, training-wheels-mode, and rocket-ship-mode. Originally built as a teaching programming language, it has significantly outgrown its pedagogical roots and is now a very robust applications language. I’m even developing a business project in it as we speak!

But it is a little rough around the edges. While it has a lot to make it a very easy language to learn, it is ultimately meant for computer scientists, those in training and those in working. There is an underlying feeling to everything that “this easy thing will eventually get harder.” As I see more and more inside the Racket community itself, I know that that is not their intention, and that they hope to be able to bring the joy of programming to everyone, regardless of their background.

A tool that has brought the joy of programming to everyone has been Processing. Processing, in a round-about way, brought a lot of features of the Racket[1] environment to Java. There are some very, very clear parallels between the DrRacket programming environment and the Processing editor. If this was unintentional, then it at least clearly indicates the superiority of the form as a pedagogical tool, as two independent environments have both evolved the same feature. If it was intentional, then there are ways in presentation in which Processing has grown past Racket that I think could be brought back to Racket-land.

Racket and Processing

At a very high level, you can see the similarities between the DrRacket editor and the Processing editor. I have intentionally made the code samples different for each, as they represent more of the canonical methodology for each language[2].

A checkboard. Left: DrRacket. Right: Processing

As an artist with a very strong background in computer science, there are things about Racket that appeal to me that Processing will never be able to do[3]. There are things about Processing that are very awesome and very nice that Racket could do, if someone with a very strong background in computer science took the time to make it so.

Where Racket succeeds over Lisp and Scheme, and where Processing–and thus Java–succeeds over all, is that enough is provided for you to not require you to learn the more advanced language features to get good results. Racket calls it “batteries included”, and it is, I believe, the most important concept that Processing borrows from Racket. Beginners don’t want to learn about “public static void mains”; to this day I still don’t know why that garbage is so necessary.

My hope is to try to bring some of the batteries of Processing back to Racket. The potential is there for Racket to be every bit as popular with artists as Processing is, today. The things that it lacks in comparison to Processing are relatively trivial to develop, in relation to the things that Processing lacks in comparison to Racket. By bringing artists into the much more powerful environment of the Racket programming language, once they have mastered the fundamentals of programming with the training-wheels mode, Racket can be molded by artists, for artists, to let people think and program in ways that the programmer-artist chooses, not in ways that the original language designer chose for them. If there are two groups of people that I know hate being told how to think more than anyone, it’s artists and programmers.

I’d like to hear from the Hive76 readership, especially those who have experience with Processing (though all are welcome to comment), about what you like and don’t like about Processing, about programming, about art, about putting code down in text files, etc. This certainly applies to the Arduino crowd, as well, as Arduino is based on Processing. In the meantime, I have a few thoughts on where the work could begin.

Make the website prettier

First impressions are important, and most programming language websites are prettier than Racket’s. I would more readily crib from Ruby than from Processing here. Ruby’s website is very clean and concise, very inviting and pleasing. Everyone cares about taste, especially artists.

Racket’s website is built in Racket, with a sub-language called Scribble, specifically designed for building documents and documentation. It’s an excellent language, but its default styling is kind of ugly. Restyling the site is a low-hanging fruit that could bring in more people, if only because they don’t jump ship prematurely.

Make more dynamic examples for beginners

The Racket documentation has its heart in the right place, but ultimately feels like its drawing examples are just pat examples. The drawings aren’t very interesting and its not immediately obvious how one gets to more interesting things. See this page for an example. It’s easy to draw a smiley face in Racket, it’s much harder to draw a good looking smiley face. And before it becomes apparent, the documentation dives too quickly into the computer science topics thereafter. In contrast, Processing starts off with examples that are extremely visually compelling. As people are visual creatures by nature, this seems the superior methodology. Note that the Processing example is the introductory page to the documentation–one click off of the front page–whereas the Racket example is several pages into the documentation–two clicks and several screenfuls of scrolling off of the front page. Much more compelling examples in Racket are much more deeply hidden.

[1] Historical Note: Racket has been around since 1994, when it was originally called PLT Scheme. They figured they lost more people being immediately associated with Scheme and Lisp than they gained, so in 2010 they changed the name to underscore the fact that there is so much more to Racket than the name “Scheme” implies. Suffice to say, for beginners it doesn’t matter, other than knowing that their is history to the project and it isn’t going away anytime soon.

[2] There are problems in both examples; both are overly simplistic and both would not scale well for large applications. But the gist of the difference is there, Racket is about functions that define what we want to happen, Processing (because it is based on Java) is about instructions. The differences to the non computer scientist are difficult to explain, so for now you will just have to take my word for it that the former is a generalization of the latter and is therefore more robust and open for greater expressiveness.

[3] For the computer scientists reading, succinctly: macros. You either know what I mean or you don’t, this is not the place to get into a technical description of macros. For the non-computer scientists, the best analogy I can make is magic. Magic isn’t real in our world, but I can think of nothing that comes closer to resembling it than the massive productivity gains that macros can afford, once mastered. But neither is mastery of macros in Racket required to do great work. Processing is what happens to languages like Java that do not have macros. In Racket, something like Processing would stay a part of Racket and not be a separate project.

]]>http://www.hive76.org/processing-and-racket/feed14906Render your next Logo Designhttp://www.hive76.org/render-your-next-logo-design
http://www.hive76.org/render-your-next-logo-design#commentsFri, 03 May 2013 13:50:58 +0000http://www.hive76.org/?p=4858Blender, the awesome open-source do-everything model/rig/render/animate program continues to be an important part of my toolkit. The ArtistCommunity is definitely a huge bonus. So check out this excellent tutorial over at BlenderGuru.com

So…I put Sean’s Harrow through it’s paces, and here are some of my newest desktop backgrounds.

First you get the basic render down. I use 32-bit color with OpenEXR file format, saving z-buffer info too, just, you know, in case you need it later. You should get something like this… kind of flat when viewed on a crappy computer screen, but i assure you there is a ton of color info there for fine tuning later.

With all that extra color depth, you can easily fine tune the contrast, like so.

Then you need to come up with the shadow version… Andrew Price from BlenderGuru does this in a new Scene. I like the stark contrast… when you look carefully the sharp edges tell you that you are looking at a perspective view.

]]>http://www.hive76.org/nanobots/feed24416Leaders of the 3D Printing Revolutionhttp://www.hive76.org/leaders-of-the-3d-printing-revolution
http://www.hive76.org/leaders-of-the-3d-printing-revolution#commentsTue, 15 Jan 2013 23:34:54 +0000http://www.hive76.org/?p=4382The Creator’s Project released a new video, and our sugar printing, gelation, and blood pumping was featured in it! Trackback is to 3Ders.org The project goal is to unify artists and technologists and this video is focused on 3D Printing:

And I just got done with a talk at ScienceOnTap Philly! It was a truly excellent night! Special thanks to the Organizers and also the Hivers who came out or emailed in their support! You peeps are the best.

Here are some pics via the Twittersphere. Thanks to the photographers for posting!